Romeo + Juliet was on TV yesterday, and it reminded me of this. A friend of mine went to a stage production of the play, and the girl sitting in front of him said to the person she was with that she really hoped they did the fishtank scene.

When Romeo + Juliet came out I was working at Barnes & Noble. One night a teen girl came in and volunteered that she had just seen Romeo + Juliet.
She then asked me if the guy who wrote that had written anything else. I said "William Shakespeare?" She said, "Yeah, him"
I almost didn't show her the section.

Branaugh's Henry V is still my all time favorite. Still, there are very few Shakespeare flicks that I don't like.
That might be a better question. What Shakespeare film adaptations do you not like?

I'm with Maegs. Love me some Henry V. That Band of Brothers speech gets me verklempt every time

Pretty much anything Shakespearean by Branagh is bound to be good. His version of Hamlet smoked Mel's. I can't think of any one I've seen that I outright hated, unless you count the Dutch television production of Hamlet that they tried to make fun of on MST3K one time, but even their jokes about is sucked._________________I shouldn't get high to come up with ideas. I should come up with ideas, and THEN get high, to reward myself!

There are some that I have avoided. I just can't imagine A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, being as magical as it is on stage. There is just something about sharing the wonder with other audience members, or the laughter, or the awe. A little off subject, but I saw Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead onstage a few years ago, and it was better and funnier than the movie because the audience was sooooooo into it.

Polanski's MacBeth is pretty good, though extremely dark and bloody (look out for the decapitation scene). Polanski stuck his neck out by "improving" the play's ending, but it's in keeping with the spirit of the original, so I think it works.

Does Ran count? Also worth watching.

Olivier's King Lear is excellent, and deliberately "stagey," so it looks a lot like an actual live performance.

And coming in from left field, there's Forbidden Planet, which is obviously based on The Tempest.

Heck, I even liked Mel's Hamlet, even if they Hollywoodized it by making him more of an innocent bystander (and more "likable") than the original play has him. Hard to go wrong with Shakespeare.

You wrote:
Heck, I even liked Mel's Hamlet, even if they Hollywoodized it by making him more of an innocent bystander (and more "likable") than the original play has him. Hard to go wrong with Shakespeare.

But it is possible to do so--I consider that film as an example of how not to do Hamlet. Part of the point of the play is that Hamlet is a man too much caught up in his thoughts, so that thinking takes the place of acting. Unfortunately, he is in a situation that cries out for action. All of Shakespeare's tragic heroes are misplaced, forced into the one situation that brings out all their faults.

To bring this off, you *have* to see Hamlet thinking, and so that is what Shakespeare wrote. Consider the famous "So oft it chances in particular men," speech.

In it, Hamlet reasons from a particular case (the fact of Norway's tradition of making a public celebration of the King's drinking), to its consequences (other nations concluding the Norwegians are drunkards), and from there to the general observation that one well-known fault will color the estimation of the world, despite whatever virtues someone might possess.

In the Gibson Hamlet, Zeffirelli cuts that speech to bits, inserting parts of it, in no particular order, into the film. He was trying to make the film visually more dynamic, which I don't think he achieved, but instead he ended up undercutting the logic of the piece. Hamlet in his movie is not a thinker, because we no longer observe him thinking.

The problem with that wasn't that they Hollywoodized it. The problem was that they didn't understand it.

Olivier's version is okay (and certainly the prettiest), but if you really want to see it, see Derek Jacobi's version, done for the BBC in the early 1980's. They had no budget at all, but the cast (including Patrick Stewart as the King) make it completely believable. The only mis-step is the difficult part of Ophelia, which Lalla Ward did only so-so with.

Oddly enough, Helena Bonham Carter in the Gibson Hamlet is the best Ophelia I've ever seen, a rare good bit in that otherwise dreadful movie. Kate Winslet was a close second in the Branagh Hamlet.

My favorite two Shakespeare plays on film are Branagh's Henry V, and the Peter Brook production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. with a dream-cast that included Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren, Judy Dench, Ian Holm, and Ian Richardson.[/b][/u]

Great moments in going to the movies: my wife and I saw it at a Friday evening show at a suburban mall. We had twenty years on the young, teenage girls who made up most of the audience. As we were walking out, a couple of teenage girls were talking about it, a few feet from us, and we overheard:

shakespeare? can u say overacting? it's best read to yourself. once anyone starts saying shakespeare out loud they all start sounding like rupert everett's asshole. but whenever i need a laugh i do tune in to see the hollywood jackasses stumble around 'anglish', smirking like rupert everetts once-puckered plop-hole.
tee-hee.

In the Gibson Hamlet, Zeffirelli cuts that speech to bits, inserting parts of it, in no particular order, into the film. He was trying to make the film visually more dynamic, which I don't think he achieved, but instead he ended up undercutting the logic of the piece. Hamlet in his movie is not a thinker, because we no longer observe him thinking.

The problem with that wasn't that they Hollywoodized it. The problem was that they didn't understand it.

I haven't seen the movie nor read the play in about seven years, so I'm fuzzy on the details. 99% of all Shakespeare productions--stage, film, what have you--condense the play somewhat, often shortening speeches or omitting them completely. Otherwise, the running time would be just too long for modern audiences. That's inevitable.

I do remember that Mel's Hamlet took out the ambiguity of the play--that's what I meant when I say they "Hollywoodized" it. In the play, Hamlet goes from a guy who thinks too much to a guy who decides "readiness is all." But--and here's the main question of the play--is he right? It really isn't resolved. Being excessively introspective can cause problems, but being a "man of action" can too. The play finally doesn't favor either philosophy.

You don't get that from Mel's version. You just think, "Poor Hamlet, caught up in circumstances beyond his control." Hollywood doesn't like tragic flaws.

shakespeare? can u say overacting? it's best read to yourself. once anyone starts saying shakespeare out loud they all start sounding like rupert everett's asshole. but whenever i need a laugh i do tune in to see the hollywood jackasses stumble around 'anglish', smirking like rupert everetts once-puckered plop-hole.
tee-hee.

"it's best to read to yourself" i cannot disagree more. it's a play. it's meant to be read aloud. the reason so many schoolage people find it impossible is it's much harder to "get" on the page, because it was designed to be read aloud. the cadence is lost on the page, the meter... it is easy to mess up aloud. but that doesn't mean people should stop doing it. and there are a million people throughout time who've spoken it aloud who didn't sound like assholes. branagh, for all his faults, loves the words and it sounds like it, olivier, though not a particular favorite of mine, certainly doesn't come off an idiot... and these are just the modern film versions. i suggest you actually go and see a midsummer night's dream performed by a professional acting troupe and then try to read it to yourself, and you'll see that it is meant to be seen and heard, not flipped through in the confines of your lounge chair.

I normally go to Free Shakespeare In The Park in Golden Gate Park every summer, but this year, where I've exiled myself to Hell-A, I missed it.

They always do great outdoor performances, innovative staging without being too high-concept and it just makes a huge difference to watch it and hear the words. Except if the wind kicks up, like it often does, you hear ... "And HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS ... Mercutio"

They did The Tempest one year and used giant puppets, the kind you see in some of those street protests, as a couple of the characters. And what's cool about being outside, they can run off stage and go into the audience.

There is a troupe in Manhattan called Gorilla Repertory Theatre does a Midsummer Nights Dream in Washington Square Park every summer. The park is the stage and the audience follows the players around the park. I thought that was really cool. For being named the #22 reason to love living in New York by Time Out, there weren't a lot of people there feeling the love. Mostly bewildered drug dealers, a few homeless people and a handful of NYU English majors.

I haven't seen the movie nor read the play in about seven years, so I'm fuzzy on the details. 99% of all Shakespeare productions--stage, film, what have you--condense the play somewhat, often shortening speeches or omitting them completely. Otherwise, the running time would be just too long for modern audiences. That's inevitable.

That is true, but it's not what I'm talking about. Zeffirelli took speeches and re-arranged them, thus making them lose the logical coherency they had in the original. By changing the order of them, he lost the fact that Hamlet was linking one point to another, displaying his ability to reason and think, which are the heart of the character.

There is a fine hand required to edit/condense Shakespeare's plays, and in this case, the director did not have it.

Partially, that may be because Zeffirelli is Italian, and English is not his native language, but I suspect it's even simpler than that: Zeffirelli always latches onto the strong emotions and the spectacle of the works he directs. It made him ideal for a version of "Romeo and Juliet;" but served him very poorly with "Hamlet."

Consider, for example, his version of the fencing match at the end of "Hamlet." The text refers, again and again, to the fencing foils. One of the plot points was that one of the foils has a sharp tip, which Laertes can use to cut, and poison, Hamlet. But Zeffirelli, going for more dramatic images, has Hamlet and Laertes going after each other with broadswords. I kept waiting for one of their arms to go flying off, followed by the ever-popular line, "It's only a flesh wound."

I like to think of myself as an intelligent and cultured dude - I've read my share of the classics, watched more arthouse flicks than you can poke a stick at, and my bookshelf groans under the weight of tomes on everything from history to religion. However, I labour under one dark, terrible secret, and it's this: I'm not a fan of Shakespeare.

I've desperately tried to think of reasons that don't make me sound like an idiot, but in the end it boils down to two things:

i) I don't find the stories paricularly interesting (what is Hamlet, after all, but a standard tale of vengeance with literary overtones?)

ii) Try as I might, I've never been able to follow more than half the dialogue when I'm not reading it (if the DVD versions had plain English subtitles, I'd be using 'em). Sure, it's poetic, but my experience is that poetry works best on the printed page or in short, sharp readings. Two hours is trying my patience.

I feel better now that this terrible weight has been lifted from my shoulders - I'm off to read War and Peace as penance.

Guv

P.S. If there are any real fans of the Bard out there, perhaps you'd like to tune me in to the source of your passion. It's never too late to change my ways.